When I say that I believe the best stand-up comics are true prophets, I'm not referring to Albert Brooks warning us all that Saddam Hussein was training "kamikaze" pilots, an alarm he sounded in Esquire in 1999. Brooks wasn't joking, either; we were eating lunch, and he was kvetching about not being able to find a gas mask small enough to fit his infant son.

A nice trick if you can pull it off, but prophecy in the Nostradamus sense, or that whole messenger-of-God thing, isn't what I mean when ascribing prophet status to Louis C. K. or Chris Rock or Doug Stanhope or their forebears. They aren't seers or priests. They're truth tellers. They're teachers. Takers of liberty, givers of offense, their hostility is deliberate, their cruelty relentless — freeing us to laugh at our weakness, pain, and rage. No wonder we repay them with our love.

Theirs is a mystical calling. Unlike other things that permit us to see ourselves as more human than animal — clothing, say, or tiramisu — laughter does not yield to analysis, critical or scientific. Other species have no need or desire for a necktie and dessert, nor do they live harrowed by hate, self- and otherwise, or haunted by rue and the certainty of death. Bits about ties and flan may be, in theory, funny; loathing and loss and mortality itself on a prophet's barbed tongue are bitterly, essentially hilarious.

Don't get me wrong: I was smitten by Henny, Shecky, Hope, and Benny long before I ever knew regret, and I'm still glad to laugh at dick jokes delivered by any vantz brave enough to tremble upon a stage with nothing but a spotlight and five minutes to bomb. But as what passes for substance in our pop culture descends further into shrieking dreck, I'm more grateful than ever for the belly laughs that feel like revelation.

Revealed, the truth reveals us, fools on a forced march to oblivion. It hurts like hell, exactly as it should. There's truly only one good way to exit: laughing.